Boyle-ing point

Although venerated by the likes of Salman Rushdie, David Eggers and Bret Easton Ellis for his novels, Tom Coraghessan Boyle is also a confirmed master of the short story, and maybe the chief inheritor of a mantle previously held by John Cheever or Raymond Carver, both of whom he knew as a young writer studying in Iowa in the ’70s.

Boyle’s current and 15th book After The Plague, his sixth short story collection, is the work of a writer utterly on top of his craft. The 16 stories are sardonic and razor sharp cuts of American life: A no-count recovering coke fiend goes to live in Detroit working for his older brother in an abortion clinic, greeted everyday by mobs of pro-life protesters straight out of a George A. Romero zombie flick. A middle-aged academic becomes obsessed with watching his neighbours on the Internet, young girls living in a Big Brother style household called peephall.com. A mild-mannered 30-something woman finds herself transformed and empowered during an air rage incident.

These are not merely grotesques. Boyle is a sensitive and shrewd scribe, capable of compressing entire back-stories into stray paragraphs, often leaving the reader haunted by his characters after the last line. Which begs the question, how does he know when to stop? When is a short story a short story, not a novel with its throat cut?

“Well, I work in a kind of rigid way,” the author explains, “ that is, all things that I write are stories, whether they’re two pages or 15 or 300 or 500. I begin with the first line and follow it to the end, and I’m always surprised and a little excited. There’s an addictive thrill to discovering an ending, it just keeps me writing fiction. Even a story like ‘She Wasn’t Soft’, which has such a wonderfully evil ending, I had no idea that would happen prior to my writing it.”

I won’t give away any details, but Boyle is not flattering himself here – many of his yarns are distinguished by truly wicked twists, usually featuring men or women on the verge of violence.

“Absolutely,” he affirms, “It’s a function of overpopulation. Even what’s going on with regard to Afghanistan could certainly point to the future – more ethnic division, more fights for territory and resources. We just cannot expand exponentially.”

On that note, After The Plague’s title story is skin-crawlingly timely; a matter of fact portrayal of an America almost totally depopulated by a mutation of the Ebola virus – touchy subject matter given the current biohazard paranoia.

“Many people have asked about this,” Boyle says, “and also stories like ‘Friendly Skies’ or ‘Killing Babies’ in that they seem almost prophetic. It’s not that I can see into the future, it’s just that I worry about everything! I just can’t help it. I read the newspaper every day like everyone else, and in order to meditate on these things I write short stories. And so, ‘After The Plague’ seems prophetic at this moment, but whether the plague is imposed upon us by our own foolishness or by nature, it’s got to come at some point because we are an animal species that has overpopulated its environment.”

Does he feel any better for having written about these things?

“I’m afraid, like Samuel Beckett, I remain utterly depressed at all times even though I seem very cheerful and enjoy a good life. No, it doesn’t make me feel better. I don’t really get the consolation of art beyond the creation of it itself, then it’s onto the next thing. In fact, maybe that’s how a writer achieves an oeuvre eventually, you just continue to work over the same themes and obsessions in different ways in the hope that somehow will resolve some of your own problems.”